I've attached a few different vantage points and placed the QFP SXL2-66 next to it for comparison.

Yes, this is essentially what I was working on. Someone online pointed out this particular item for sale, so I figured I'd grab it for comparison. I had hoped that it contained a voltage regulator, but it didn't. Someone on CPU world claims he has one with a VRM and I have been bugging him for a photo, but no photo has turned up as of yet. Hopefully, if life improves for me, I'll pickup the PCB design efforts for this late in the fall. Obviously, I'd want to include a VRM. I don't like it when the stack gets so tall like this. I also don't like all the added circuitry.

The PGA132 to PGA168 interposer contains a quad 2-input NAND gate (74VHC00) and a 7-bit counter (74HC4024D). The counter appears to be counting clocks and resets when pin 2 is triggered high. I wish there was documentation on what functions these serve. The Gainberry VRM interposer contains 3 logic chips: a dual comparitor (LM393M), a band-gap voltage reference (LM385), and a mystery IC with markings BHΔ w542. Of course, it also a voltage regulator module, LT1528CT. My second Gainberry VRM has a defective LT1528CT, so I am having to order a replacement. I will run the SXL2-66 at 3.6V on the replacement Gainberry because it is modded already with a trimmer.

Perhaps someone has some idea as to what value these IC's provide to these interposers? The PGA 132 version of the SXL2-50 works just fine without them, so...

On my design, I would want to centre the PGA132 to the PGA168 for symmetry.

Mmmmm, sammich.

IIRC if you use the FDC on that scsi card, it is faster than a "normal" one.

Downloading old ftp sites that have drivers and software on them.

Found quite a few sites that had stuff I was either looking for or stuff I didn't have yet.

Lots of driver packages as well as some more Yamaha XG tools that I hadn't been able to find before.

Now my 2TB drive I have been downloading FTP stuff to for quite a while has less than 285GB free space left and I am still downloading.

luckybob wrote:

IIRC if you use the FDC on that scsi card, it is faster than a "normal" one.

Does anyone have benchmark data to back that up? I've tried both ports and haven't noticed anything special.

I think it was just a DMA thing, so it didn't halt the system during R/W. But I've always used it when I had the opportunity.

I thought standard ISA floppy controllers used DMA?

For a test bed, I leave the floppy on the multi I/O ISA card because I do not always use the SCSI card. For cased systems, I often use the floppy controller on the SCSI card.

cyclone3d wrote:

Downloading old ftp sites that have drivers and software on them. […]
Show full quote

Downloading old ftp sites that have drivers and software on them.

Found quite a few sites that had stuff I was either looking for or stuff I didn't have yet.

Lots of driver packages as well as some more Yamaha XG tools that I hadn't been able to find before.

Now my 2TB drive I have been downloading FTP stuff to for quite a while has less than 285GB free space left and I am still downloading.

Which Yamaha xg tools ?

I have soldered cables for my Tandon Hercules build to connect 0 and +5V to IDE-CF adapter. Not the greatest achievement of humanity, but hey, a year ago I did not know how to solder.

Getting some oldschool dev tools up & running. I'll let you guys figure out what I'm doing with this. 😉

xjas wrote:

Getting some oldschool dev tools up & running. I'll let you guys figure out what I'm doing with this. 😉

CameraZOOM-20180616125448791.jpg

Which IBM model is that?

Thinkpad i1420 / model 2621. Acer-made. 😜

I've always liked the engineer-esque look of the IBM Thinkpads. When Lenovo took over, they lady'd it up somewhat.

xjas wrote:

Thinkpad i1420 / model 2621. Acer-made. 😜

Looks quite cool! And lets you play audio CDs while working (nice).

You can actually play audio CDs while it's off, you just pop one in the drive and use the front panel controls. There's even a dedicated power switch there to turn the CD player function (only) on & off. Haven't seen that on any other laptop.

xjas wrote:

Getting some oldschool dev tools up & running. I'll let you guys figure out what I'm doing with this. 😉

CameraZOOM-20180616125448791.jpg

You're a braver fellow than I. When I get around to working on my software projects, I'm generally too paranoid to go with less compile-time safety than pascal and, even if I do, I stick to stuff where others can contribute without resorting to eBay or software piracy, such as Free Pascal or OpenWatcom C/C++. (Though, despite that, I have accumulated quite the collection of Visual C++, Borland C++, and Delphi versions.)

As for what I'm doing today, I just uploaded a nice little nagless donationware utility for Windows 3.1x that I dug out of the depths of the Google Groups Usenet archive search.

Terrible day at the garage sales. Absolutely nothing but junk. On the other hand, I am starting a restore of a Pentium 100 system with 64MB RAM. It will need some paint and scrubbing inside and out. Once done, it will be my demo machine for the Cardinal SNAPplus video card I picked up over a month ago. Youtube videos incoming once done.

Deksor wrote:

cyclone3d wrote:

Downloading old ftp sites that have drivers and software on them. […]
Show full quote

Downloading old ftp sites that have drivers and software on them.

Found quite a few sites that had stuff I was either looking for or stuff I didn't have yet.

Lots of driver packages as well as some more Yamaha XG tools that I hadn't been able to find before.

Now my 2TB drive I have been downloading FTP stuff to for quite a while has less than 285GB free space left and I am still downloading.

Which Yamaha xg tools ?

Check out the XG resource repository link in my sig. I'm putting everything I find on there. Some of it isn't sorted so there are a few duplicates.

One of the ones I haven't uploaded yet is Y-Studio. I gather it came with certain driver packages from the youtube video I watched about it. One of the ones I didn't have before and uploaded was XG Studio 1.0E
Also uploaded XG Bank I think a couple days before that.

As for what I did today...
I started a 386 DX-40 build with a rackmount case, 14-slot backplane, and an I-BUS full length SBC. Bios shows a key sequence that lets you enable/disable the cache while the system is running. Also shows a few different options for key sequences to bring up different things when booting/rebooting. I need to replace the barrel battery (lithium so no leakage) so it will keep settings and time.

The BIOS also has LBA support 😀

I also went ahead and tested all my ISA VGA video cards.. I think. I may have a few more somewhere else.

Found that one of my Trident 8900C cards is dead and that I also have a flaky Cirrus Logic card. I think it may be a capacitor issue though. It works, but the h-sync seems to be off. I am using a Dell 19" LCD to test and most of the time when I powered the computer on, the text was all wavy/shaky. Every once it a while it would boot up and look normal.

I will be using a couple of the RAM chips from the dead Trident card to upgrade my Roland MT-200 so I can put the 2.01 firmware on it.

I also revived an Orchid Fahrenheit 1280 that had a badly corroded dip socket and chip. The chip was a real pain to get out. I scraped the corrosion off the chip legs and then put a few drops of Lemon essential oil in the dip socket and used a random chip I had laying around and inserted/removed it a few times to help work the corrosion loose. Then I cleaned it with dish soap, water, and a toothbrush and then dried it off with my air compressor.
Put the chip back in and it fired right up.
When I originally got this card it was really, really dirty. I had already scrubbed it with soap and water but figured I would want to clean up the corrosion before I even attempted to see if it would work.

Had a quick play around with boot disks for DOS Plus & Concurrent DOS on my XT. Mostly just curiosity, nothing really practical.

Also stripped down my 286 build to get some better pictures of the motherboard and then rebuilt it fully, including returning parts previously borrowed when testing my XT build. All back up and running 100% again.

I also took the opportunity to have a look at the CPU hiding behind the heatsink and found an Intel R80286-10. It's running overclocked at 12MHz, which probably explains why when I found information online for this board it kept saying the CPU was 10MHz.

I have no idea if that overclock is deliberate or something wonky on this board. Very occasionally I do get some weird speed issues, where games will play a little too fast on BOTH Turbo settings and system info utilities which ordinarily detect the CPU speed correctly, will suddenly start detecting as the CPU running at 4.77MHz. A power cycle usually cures that and it doesn't happen too often so I have no idea if the 2 peculiarities are related.

Started chipping off ventilation slots on the back of my Pentium 4 computer case build, to increase better air flow